The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change

Preface

I LOVE WINTER. It’s when I fly through the birch forest like a hawk. If the snow is good at Anchorage’s Kincaid Park, the cross-country ski trails swoop among old trees and over steep, round hills, unwrapping silent white glades and black thickets etched with hoarfrost in quick, smoothly evolving succession. The air feels cool on my perspiring face and steam rises from my chest. Topping a tall hill, I can see gray-blue ice gliding swiftly to sea in the currents of Cook Inlet, the bluffs and low forest beyond, and, on the horizon, sharp-carved mountains, glowing yellow in the low-angle sunshine. Then I push off and hear the wind rushing past my ears as I crouch on the fast downhill. This is what I think of when I’m trapped in muddy traffic in April or when I’m stuck at my computer watching the rain pour down in September. Winter—freedom, purity, grace—the season when the world turns solid, clean, and sharp.

But some recent winters were stillborn in this part of Alaska. Fall came late. At Halloween, when it should be deep snow, we took the children trick-or-treating without coats. The winter’s first snowfall was later than ever before, then we had rain and thaw. The ski trails were ruined; running instead, plodding and earthbound, was no substitute. In late winter, normally the best season, the sled dog races were canceled for lack of snow. That almost never happened when I was a child, but now it was happening every couple of years. Some rivers never froze over the winter. Native elders said they had never seen such warm conditions. Everyone talked about it every day, and then everyone stopped. After a while, you couldn’t talk about it anymore. Lovers of winter—skiing friends and skaters, snowmachiners, hunters, and dog mushers—all looked stricken and heartsick, and there was nothing left to say.

Science tells us no single winter can be blamed on global climate change. Weather naturally varies from year to year, while climate represents a broad span of time and space beyond our immediate perception. But now science, too, took notice. Average winter temperatures in Interior Alaska had risen 7 degrees F since the 1950s. Annual precipitation increased by 30 percent from 1968 to 1990. Alaska glaciers were shrinking, permanently frozen ground was melting, spring was earlier, and Arctic sea ice was thinner and less extensive than ever before measured. Winter was going to hell.

The Iñupiaq elders of the Arctic noticed first. Sustained for a thousand years by hunting whales from the floating ice, they had developed fine perception of the natural systems around them. Scientists predicted that global climate change would come first and strongest in the Arctic and went there to learn how the sky, ice, snow, water, and tundra interacted to drive changes in the world’s environment. Fascinating discoveries accumulated along that path. But the Iñupiat already knew the patterns in the system and how they changed through time, a sense of the whole the wisest researchers recognized and envied. Some sought access to that culture and way of seeing. Others studied how the Iñupiat were adapting to the new world, knowing that the rest of mankind would eventually follow.

The climate here was changing; that was beyond debate. Burning fossil fuels had greatly elevated the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. The physics of carbon dioxide trapping the sun’s heat on earth, and the rough magnitude of that effect on the planet’s heat balance, had been firmly established more than thirty years earlier. We had crime scene, victim, suspect, motive, opportunity, and smoking gun. There was plenty of evidence to convict. We lacked scientific proof to say how much climate change was man-made and how much was natural or to predict exactly what would happen next. The earth is complex; perhaps predicting the future isn’t possible. Still, argument raged on over these marginal uncertainties in the face of this enormous, palpable reality.

Let others parry and thrust with the skeptics’ abstractions. Here, instead, is climate change in the flesh, the story of individual people at their particular time and place, and what they saw with their eyes and felt in their bones. Here is climate change being lived, the adventure of surviving and thriving as human organisms who must adapt to a new natural world. The Iñupiat have a creation myth about when the earth was upside down; they’ve been through this before. Christians have their own creation myth; all people have spiritual ideas about land and wilderness. As the world turns upside down again, our species is embarking on an epic physical, moral, and cultural journey. If we’re honest, we’ll be forced to readjust our fundamental beliefs about how we relate to nature as a species in an ecological niche. The Iñupiat are at the lead, and they seem to be excellent guides.

Over the span of a warm and dreary winter in Anchorage, I learned to enjoy running. When buds formed on the birch trees in time for my father’s birthday in April—they used to come nearer my birthday in May—I could only greet them with joy. Day by day, one season at a time, I began to adjust. I was not ready to accept in my heart that the world would always be different, but I was learning to live in the conditions that nature brought to me.

CHAPTER ONE

The Whale

THE BRINK OF THE SHOREFAST SEA ICE cut the water like the edge of a swimming pool. A white canvas tent, several snow-machines and big wooden sleds, and a sealskin umiaq whale boat waited like poolside furniture on the blue-white surface of the ice. Gentle puffs rippled the open water a foot or two below, except near the edge, where a fragile skin of new ice stilled the surface. Sun in the north reached from the far side of the lead, backlighting the water and picking out the imperfections in this clear, newborn ice with a contrast of yellow-orange and royal blue. This was after midnight on May 6, 2002, three miles offshore from the NAPA auto parts store in Barrow, Alaska.

A hushed voice urged me on toward the edge.

Come on, there’s a fox. They follow the polar bears.

The fox ran past the camp, beyond the ice edge, danced as it ran, upon that new skin of ice floating on the indigo water. An hour or two earlier there had been no ice there at all and now it looked no thicker than a crust of bread. The fox used tiny, rapid steps. Its feet disappeared in motion. Its back arched high and its tail pulled up tall, as if strings were helping suspend it on that insubstantial film of hardened water. Somehow it knew how much weight a brand-new sheen of ice could hold, and knew how to calibrate each step within that limit. The Iñupiaq whalers of Oliver Leavitt Crew watched and muttered with admiration as the fox pranced out of sight. All were experienced hunters, even the young ones, but they were impressed by this skill. This animal knew something valuable, something they would like to know, something that could help them survive.

The five younger members of the crew had been building an ice trail back from the edge. Swinging ice axes and a pick ax, they pounded through ridges as high as a garden shed, pitching broken ice boulders to fill in the dips. The road would be an alternate escape route for the snow-machines and sleds should ice conditions deteriorate, and also a secondary access route to send a young guy back to town for pop and doughnuts if life in camp continued as normal. The young men had been working for twelve hours. Billy Jens Leavitt, the captain’s son, was the boss of this job. He was gigantic, tall with huge limbs and feet, swinging a heavy pick ax like a nightstick. His father bragged, by complaining, that Billy Jens tended to throw the harpoon too hard, embedding not only its head but also the shaft in the whale. Ambrose Leavitt and Gilford Mongoyak were Billy Jens’s juniors on the crew, but both adults. Ambrose missed his baby; Oliver wouldn’t send him home on errands for fear he wouldn’t come back. Gilford talked a lot of his one- and two-year-olds. Polite Jens Hopson was a high school kid and Brian Ahkiviana a seventh grader, shy but cheerful, and big for his age. Both had soft young faces but worked like men.

I was older than any of them and they treated me with noticeable respect, and that was a little awkward, since I knew a small fraction of what the youngest of them knew about what we were doing. When I arrived I had to take an ice ax from someone. There were only five axes and six of us. Billy Jens wouldn’t tell me whose ice ax to take; he wouldn’t tell an older man what to do. They stood around me in a circle as I tried quickly to size up the situation. Then I stepped up and took Billy Jens’s big pick ax, thinking that would show I knew he was the boss, and I said, You look like you could use a rest. In fact, he didn’t need a rest, and he liked the heavy pick best. As we started working he took an ax from one of the younger guys, and when I set down the big one for a break he grabbed it but never said a word.

Oliver Leavitt himself sat on a long wooden sled next to his thermos and his VHF marine radio, silently gazing on the water and the ice chunks and bergs drifting by imperceptibly slowly on the calm surface. When I first went out on the sea ice with Iñupiaq hunters I was confused and somewhat bored by long stops when, standing like statues, they stared at the horizon. I secretly thought these guys shouldn’t smoke so much if they needed this much rest. One day I learned the purpose of the stillness. I was alone for a while at a whale lookout, pacing for warmth, when a hunter came to my side and took up that gazing posture, as if posing for a romantic painting of a noble Eskimo. Within a minute he pointed out a large polar bear that was approaching about a hundred yards away. To my eye, the bear’s appearance was like magic, as if this hunter knew how to summon ghosts from their hiding places. Silent, motionless watching had made the bear visible and prevented us from being potential prey. The whiteness around us, which looked like a vast wreck, a static chaos without scale or reference, in fact was full of information for those who knew how to read it. But first, one must establish a pace slower than the change one wished to observe.

A polar bear swimming past the Oliver Leavitt Camp stopped and paddled in place, raising its long neck far above the water like a periscope to scan the area. On the horizon, across the wide lead of open water, the white tips of jagged pressure ridges showed like the tips of a mountain range on a distant continent.

No longer able to stay awake, I went to join the young guys in the tent. Like all Iñupiaq whalers, the crew used white canvas wall tents, smaller versions of the classic army tent, with sturdy lumber supports and panels of insulated plywood on the floor. A propane burner often brewed a pot of cowboy coffee (gritty coffee made by throwing grounds in with the water), but even when nothing was cooking the flame always stayed lit to keep the tent warm. The plywood grub box contained a bonanza of cookies, candy, and the Eskimos’ favorite, frosted doughnuts. Warm meals arrived from home in plastic Igloo coolers: fried chicken, or aluuttigaaq (a delicious caribou stir-fry with thick gravy), or a treat of maktak, the whale’s blubber and skin, raw or pickled. Anything with a lot of fat to keep you warm in cold weather. Next to the grub box were cases of Coke and 7-Up; the ice underneath kept them cool. Socks, gloves, and boot liners hung to dry on the ridgepole of the tent, but everyone had to sleep fully dressed in parkas, snow pants, and Arctic boots. Escaping breaking ice could depend on it; quick escapes happened several times a season. The men, as many as six or eight at a time, slept side by side on piles of blankets and the pelts of caribou and polar bear in an area the size of a king-sized bed. With sleep in short supply, close contact with other unwashed men was no barrier to drifting off.

I woke at 5:30 a.m. to see more polar bears; this time a mother and cub were swimming by, the cub resting on the mother’s back. Oliver was still sitting in the same place, looking out in the same direction. The ice continent across the water was closer now: the pressure-ridge mountains were entirely visible. Oliver invited me to sit, drink coffee, and talk. I had been told to keep quiet in whale camp. Crewmen in the whale camp and skin boat, the umiaq, should be quiet and harmonious. Bowhead whales could hear at a great distance and had been seen to divert their paths at a camp noise such as a slamming grub box. In the dark of winter, before the whales arrived, the women who sewed the ugruk (bearded seal) cover for the umiaq worked in calm and harmony. When a whaling season went badly, people often said it was because of some conflict going on in town. The Iñupiat dislike conflict. In whale camp, teenagers didn’t speak until spoken to. But Oliver said, Hell, you’re not a kid.

Oliver was a big, round man who used his face to tell you where you stood: he could switch quickly from a blank, inscrutable face, to an aggressive just try me face, to a knowing smile suggesting you could see half his cards but probably not the best ones. When he was a boy he shot ducks for elders who could no longer hunt for themselves. This skill gave him a small role in an event that helped start the militant phase of the movement for Alaska Native land claims. In May 1961, shortly after Alaska became a state, a game warden arrested a Barrow subsistence hunter for killing a duck out of season. A law made up far away, for reasons irrelevant to feeding Iñupiat families, closed duck hunting from March 10 to September 1, virtually the entire period migratory birds spent in the Arctic. Barrow villagers protested by holding a duck-in; they presented themselves to the game warden for arrest, each with a dead duck in hand, almost 150 men, women, and children in all. Oliver’s crew provided most of the ducks, passing out about 150 of the 300 they had recently shot, so more people could turn themselves in (some took two, one for the arrest and one for dinner).

Oliver first went to whale camp when he was in fifth grade. His father, who did odd jobs and unloaded freight, didn’t have the wealth to outfit a whaling crew, so Oliver went with his uncles and learned from them in the traditional way, by watching, then doing, and receiving sharp correction for errors. One of his uncles would hit crewmen with a paddle; another was kindly—dry Iñupiaq humor can be more corrective than violence.

Starting in eighth grade Oliver went away to a boarding school for Alaska Natives, graduated in 1963, received some vocational training, and lived in New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. He served in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, then returned to Barrow in 1970. An oil company had made a huge find on the North Slope and Alaska Native claims were nearing approval in Congress. The Iñupiat would soon be rich and they needed the help of young men like Oliver who had seen the world.

Sitting on the sled, Oliver was looking for whales and gauging the ice. In traditional spring whaling, the umiaq perches on the ice edge ready for launch. If a whale surfaces nearby, the crew launches as quickly and quietly as possible and paddles to the whale or to a spot where the captain expects the whale to resurface. For the harpooner to hit the whale’s vulnerable spot, just behind the skull, with a harpoon made from a long pole of heavy lumber, the captain has to maneuver the boat right onto the whale’s back or within touching distance alongside. The whale can move much faster than the boat, so most of whaling is waiting quietly for a whale to come close enough to launch. In camp, no bright colors are allowed that might catch a whale’s eye and crews avoid unnecessary noise and movement. Hunters wear white pullover parkas lined with caribou hide for camouflage on the white snow. That morning we saw only one whale, a far-off black back rolling across the surface, and heard another, a roaring blowhole exhalation from somewhere we could not see, hidden by the ice. Normally at this time of year, a crew would be seeing whales every few minutes. Crews farther down the lead were paddling in search of one, thinking the migration might be passing by on the other side of the big ice across the lead.

The ice was bad that year. It had been bad for a decade and seemed to be growing steadily worse.

The shore ice should form in the fall as bergs left over from the previous year float near the beach and are sewn together by new ice that freezes in the cooling temperatures. These big bergs are chunks of the previous year’s ice pack that never melted over the summer. They usually form out of old pressure ridges, mountains of ice built by the collisions of huge ice sheets, becoming freshwater ice as warm spring temperatures drain pockets of brine trapped inside. The surface becomes rounded and smooth and the ice becomes dense, hard, and brittle. The Iñupiat call it pigaluyak, or glacier ice. Under the surface whiteness it glows iridescent blue, like a glacier. Iñupiaq travelers use the fresh water for making tea far from home. Whalers seek out multiyear ice; it provides a strong platform for pulling up whales and it anchors the shorefast ice in place with its great mass.

In the winter of 2001–02, however, as for several years prior, little multiyear ice had appeared at Barrow. The shore ice didn’t form as solidly as it should, and it lacked the big, solid anchors that multiyear ice, or even new ice with large pressure ridges, would have provided. And on March 18, something strange and unsettling had happened. The ice went out, leaving open water right up to the beach in front of Oliver Leavitt’s house. A distant storm had created a tidal surge near Barrow that lifted and cracked the ice pack; a current had pulled it away. (The Arctic Ocean has virtually no lunar tides, but atmospheric pressure gradients cause rising and falling water levels, which the Iñupiat call tides). The ice should have been strong enough to withstand that. No one could ever remember the ice going out that early. Normally, it goes out in July. A dozen seal hunters floated out to sea on the ice. The North Slope Borough’s Search and Rescue helicopters went to find them and bring them home. Some didn’t know they were drifting away into the Arctic Ocean until the helicopter showed up for the rescue. You can’t tell you’re moving when your whole world starts to drift away.

Later, ice returned and refroze to the shore, but it wasn’t sturdy ice and it still lacked good anchors. As whaling season began, a strong west wind pushed the ice against the shore for several days, then a strong east wind tested it and cleared away some of the junk ice. Oliver’s theory now was that these events had cemented the ice adequately for safe whaling. He had chosen a flat area of ice with a color and height above the water that told him it was strong enough to pull up a whale. But every so often he sent someone to look at the watery crack that was a little behind us or to check the dark ice—weak, brand-new ice—that lay a mile or two back, between us and dry land.

Another threat occupied his mind even more that morning: the big mass of ice we could see across the lead, which was moving very slowly toward the southwest but also seemed to be getting closer at an imperceptible pace. Oliver said, That’s the dangerous ice. If people start noticing it’s coming in, we’ll be out of here in five minutes flat.

The momentum behind an ice floe, even if it is moving only slowly, is stupendous; when it hits the unmoving shore ice, the collision is like an immense, mountain-building earthquake, a terrifying event called an ivu. Oliver was young at the time of the big ivu in 1957, but he remembered how the ice went crazy, with big multiyear floes standing up on end and shattering far from the edge, forcing the crews to scramble for their lives over miles of cracking, piling ice, leaving camps, boats, and dog teams behind—their entire means of supporting their families. Now he told the story of an ivu in the 1970s that came while the village was butchering a whale caught by his uncle, Jonathan Aiken. Men raced away on snow-machines, dragging off huge strips of maktak from the whale’s side even as the ice devoured the whale’s body. He told stories like this frequently in camp while the younger members of the crew listened. The ivu stories were the scariest.

In 1978, an elder, Vincent Nageak, told gathered villagers the story of an ivu in which boats and dogs were lost, as was one man, Aanga, who was caught by a moving chunk of ice:

Right after it had bit Aanga in its grip, they tried to hurriedly … remove him from there all right, when [the ice] stopped for a little while, but he told them, I don’t think you can take me off from here with those little penknives, do you? And here he was with his pipe in his mouth, they say. I don’t think you can be able to take me off with those little penknives, do you? And so immediately after he had finished saying that, all of a sudden, without warning, it began again, and so Aanga [was taken] down under. Holding his pipe in his mouth, it is said, after [the ice] had bit him in its grip, when we was about to go out of sight, he just smiled at those [who were] there.

Iñupiaq chatter on the marine VHF radio by Oliver’s side began to flow with comments from nervous captains up and down the lead. They saw the big pressure ridges across the open water growing noticeably closer.

The radio box was a sturdy plywood case with a car battery and a tall boat antenna. Each camp could hear its base, usually the captain’s home, and other camps spread out along twenty miles of the lead. Channel 72 was for whaling and channel 68 for routine in-town communication. VHF sets seemed always close at hand near kitchen tables and under the dash of pickup trucks. In the morning people said Good morning, good morning to announce they were on the air, and the NAPA auto parts store—which carried harpoon parts and other whaling supplies—let everyone know when they were open for business. In the evening, each person said Good night when turning off the radio, and the children and grandchildren of whalers said good night to their fathers and grandfathers out in camp—sweet broadcasts of kisses and love names that the whole town could hear. One evening I heard tough old Oliver Leavitt on the VHF trading silly I-love-yous with his granddaughters, Ashley, age seven, and Appa, four. During times of peril, the VHF allowed whalers to act almost as one, sharing observations about ice and water movement and dynamics from many perspectives.

The whalers handled these technical conversations in Iñupiaq, even though many younger people are not fluent. Some handy words don’t exist in English, such as mauragaq, to cross open water by jumping from one piece of ice to the next; or tuagilaaq, to kill a whale with a single blow to the sensitive spot behind the skull; or uit—literally to open one’s eyes—a term used to indicate the breaking away of pack ice from shore ice to form an open lead of water. But one cannot attain the full benefit of Iñupiaq by simply incorporating individual words into English as technical jargon. The very structure of Iñupiaq helps deal with situations in a unique environment. Speakers can convey information quickly in a moving landscape without landmarks or any visible distinction between ocean and shore. In the absence of physical reference points, the speaker can position objects and events using movement, the relative locations of speaker and listener, and the directional orientation of the ocean and rivers. For example, pigña indicates that the thing you are talking about is above, has a length less than three times its width, is visible and stationary, and stands at equal distance between speaker and listener. Pagña contains all the same information, except that the subject’s length is more than three times its width. English has a few such words, such as hither and yonder, but they are largely obsolete and not nearly as useful. Iñupiaq endings also aid coordination by allowing speakers to pass on oral information without losing nuances about the quality of the knowledge and how it was obtained. They cover a gradient roughly ranging from I saw it myself and it is certain to Someone saw it and it might be true. (Contrary to popular belief, however, the Eskimos do not have a hundred words for snow.)

From Oliver’s vantage he could see that the apparent nearing of the ice across the lead was only the passage of a point; part of the ice island drifting parallel to our ice protruded in our direction, creating the illusion that the entire floe was moving quickly toward us. Oliver uttered a few words of Iñupiaq on the radio and the discussion stopped. You got to talk to them quick before they scare themselves, he said. Each captain’s experience and expertise were well known, another factor in how whalers evaluated conditions and safety. Oliver Leavitt’s name carried unquestioned authority.

When I first saw Oliver Leavitt Crew at work they were building the boat that now stood at the edge of the ice. The Iñupiat Heritage Center, a well-equipped cultural center and living museum in Barrow, had a large workshop called the Traditional Room, where whalers, artists, and others involved in cultural activities came to build things. Oliver’s boat was on one side while Julius and Delbert Rexford’s Atqaan crew repaired and mounted a new skin on their umiaq in the other. Oliver was known for his boat-building skills. He worked with a few crew members his own age, men like Hubert Hopson, strong and skilled but past their prime, giving them instructions as equals. The next generation in the room was represented by the Rexfords and their senior crewmen: they were around my age, nearing forty, with plenty of responsibilities of their own—Delbert was a former borough assembly member. But they asked for Oliver’s opinions, and when Oliver saw Julius doing something he didn’t like—attaching a piece to one of his own sleds—Oliver gruffly told him so and Julius quickly changed it to the way Oliver recommended. Next in seniority were Oliver’s younger crewmen, men in their twenties, including Billy Jens, Gilford, and Ambrose. They did skilled work, but under direct supervision. Oliver taught them and they listened carefully. At the bottom rung, teenage boys stood around the edges of the room waiting to be told what to do and holding their tongues. They wore their snow pants and warm boots indoors, aware that they could be sent to the store or the wood pile at any moment and would have to jump quickly.

I once asked a high school class in Barrow why teenagers were so respectful around their whaling captains. They politely made it clear this was a foolish question: no one in his right mind would risk his place on a whaling crew, a position of high status for even the lowest member. They would as soon risk a chance for a basketball scholarship. (Barrow’s other mania is basketball. Besides closely following the teams of the NBA and NCAA, young fans knew the name of the first Iñupiat to dunk the ball, a player for the Barrow High School Whalers.) But fear of being excluded from whaling was only a part of it. Young people in Barrow generally were more respectful than they were in Anchorage. Respect is fundamental in Iñupiaq culture; I think they learned it by seeing it practiced.

As the day wore on in camp, the young men did chores, checked the ice, and built a blind of ice blocks. Jens tried to complete an American history term paper that was due in a couple of days. Oliver informed him about President Warren G. Harding and the National Petroleum Reserve at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. He then told the history of the National Petroleum Reserve—Alaska, just south of us, where oil exploration brought modernity to Barrow fifty years ago and where an oil strike and the new money it would bring were still hoped for. Oliver claimed he wasn’t as articulate in English as in Iñupiaq, but he knew how to tell a good story: slowly, with sharp, percussive words, well-chosen profanity, a clear point at the end, and often a punch line.

Many of the stories were about whaling screwups: mishandled weapons, misread whale behavior, missed signs of danger on the ice. Some stories taught the history of grappling with the white world. Oliver had presided at a meeting in the early 1970s when the oil companies sent a chartered 737 full of lawyers to Barrow to say they didn’t recognize the new local government and wouldn’t pay property taxes on their oil discoveries at Prudhoe Bay. Oliver and his colleagues got the upper hand through sheer terror, playing the part of the exotic primitives. They carried lawyers in business suits to the meeting on long snowmachine rides in bitter cold March weather (really, it was a short walk). Oliver used a billy club for a gavel and threatened to mace the audience if they didn’t maintain order, offering a safety briefing to go along with the threat: The trick is don’t panic. You will be taken to the hospital. The doctors will wash your eyes out. There’s no running water here. Just don’t rub your eyes.

As afternoon progressed, the sun was bright and unseasonably warm. The ice reflected brilliantly while the deep, dark water swallowed light. The details of the pressure ridge mountains across the lead were clearly visible. The radio grew lively again. Oliver stood and watched the ice across the water intently. Everyone else stood, too, waiting for what he would say. Then, calmly, We better start packing up.

The younger men began by emptying the tent. Oliver and Hubert worked on disabling the weapons and putting away the radio. Now you could see the ice moving through the water directly toward us. The work already was going fast—everyone knew his job without a word—but Oliver said, Better hurry up, Billy. When speaking to the younger part of the crew, he addressed only Billy Jens, like an officer giving orders to a sergeant. Billy Jens grunted a few orders to the others. I tried to help, grabbing plywood floor panels and dropping them on a sled. Again, Better hurry up, Billy. Oliver’s voice had an increasingly urgent edge to it. Things not fitting in right, the boys started throwing stuff on the sleds haphazardly. Less than ten minutes had passed, but the lead was quite narrow now, just a few hundred feet. Better hurry up, Billy, the tone each time a little higher.

Billy Jens had too much to do; I tried to tie down one of the sled loads for him, using half-hitch knots for speed rather than the quick-release knots the Eskimos prefer. The load came loose—I had tied the lashing line to the wrong rope. Billy Jens came around to retie it, but my tight half hitches were tough to untie. The boat was ready to go on the sled. The ice was a hundred feet away and closing fast. Oliver said, Billy, pick up the boat. Billy was still trying to fix my mistake, without saying a word. I tried to help with the boat, but I didn’t know where to grab it. Better hurry up, Billy. Billy Jens grabbed the gunwale, we heaved the boat onto the sled and started strapping it down. I could see the crystal-thin rim of ice where the fox had run the night before and, with the lead of water almost closed, I could see the same rim on the other side approaching. We needed to escape before a possible ivu could break our ice free from the shore. Better hurry up, Billy. Miscellaneous gear was thrown in the boat. Oliver told me to grab the back of a sled, where I stood, holding the handles. The snowmachines moved into place to hitch up. Only minutes had passed.

As I was jerked into motion behind Hubert’s machine, I could see the collision begin. The glassy film of new ice from each side made contact and the delicate tracery that had supported the fox shattered and disappeared into the ocean.

We bounced wildly down the ice road we had built the night before, the boats pitching up to crazy angles on their sleds before they topped the ridges and raced down behind the snowmachines. The trail that had seemed so smooth and straight when we were chopping it now swung me wide with each turn on the back of a heavy sled of gear, crashing into ice blocks and ridges while I held on tight, bracing for each jolt. Hubert turned his head and yelled, Steer!

Steer? How?

We stopped on a big flat pan of ice near town. Crew after crew filtered in from the trails and joined us, until rows of sleds and boats stood side by side as if in a big parking lot. It was sunny and warm and a good time for friends to meet—teens with teens, captains with captains—and to talk of guns, snow machines, and ice conditions. No fear, no sense of relief. These days, with the bad ice and warm weather, an escape like this was routine.

John Craighead George, known as Craig, arrived in Barrow in 1977, having taken a job caring for animals at the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory, America’s primary research station in the Arctic, universally known as NARL. He had escaped to Alaska from Moose, Wyoming, at the base of the Tetons, a refugee from an illustrious family. His uncles, John and Frank Craighead, were world-famous experts on the grizzly bears of Yellowstone National Park. His mother, Jean Craighead George, was the author of the classic children’s books My Side of the Mountain and Julie of the Wolves. Craig himself was a scruffy mountain climber, a member of a Jackson Hole fraternity dedicated to redundant conquests of black Grand Teton and its pointy neighboring mountains. His grades were lackluster, his scientific experience thin, and his family’s success daunting. That’s why I ran, he said. It’s kind of a heavy dose.

A first flight into Barrow felt like flying to another planet. You took off in a jet from Fairbanks, a town of 80,000 in the middle of Alaska, without having left the usual interchangeable mall of gates, jetways, and airplane cabins. On a clear day you could watch untracked wilderness pass below you for a solid hour and a half: the great river valleys of the Interior, the insane multiplicity of mountain peaks in the Brooks Range, and then an area that resembled infinity—the flat green tundra of the North Slope with its randomly wandering rivers and lakes like water droplets on a windshield. On the plane’s descent nothing man-made appeared outside the window—no roads or buildings, just more oblong lakes and strands of swampy tundra—and it looked like you were going to land in one of them. The town showed up just before touchdown. From the air it looked like a load of cardboard boxes that fell off a truck in a place identical to every other place as far as the horizon.

On a map, Barrow’s location appeared quite logical, at the extreme northern tip of Alaska, on a shoreline that showed up, like any other, as a sharp boundary between the manageable terrestrial kingdom of dry land and the invisible wilderness of the sea. But here that line was a misleading metaphor. A smudgy watercolor gradation would be a more accurate one. Land and ocean were both made of water. During ten weeks of summer, the land, flat and treeless, was only a slightly warmer shade of green than the ocean. A thin layer of tundra lay atop permanently frozen ground called permafrost. Surface water sloshed around on that ice. Innumerable lakes, all lined up southeast to northwest, perpendicular to the prevailing wind, shredded the very idea of land into temporary lacy tendrils that barely stretched around reflections of the sky. The line between this flat, wet ground and the flat sea seemed entirely arbitrary. For nine months of the year the sea and land merged in whiteness. In winter, the visual difference between land and shorefast ice was merely one of texture. The shapes on shore were soft, those on the sea angular. At times, an ivu smudged the distinction further, pushing over the shore, digging and overtopping the land, and crushing anything in its path.

The town itself was strange to a new visitor, too. You left the aviation cocoon abruptly, disembarking not into a terminal but onto cold tarmac. When Craig arrived, the airport terminal consisted of a twenty-foot-square building with blankets hung in the corners to hide the toilets, which were buckets. Even in 2002, Alaska bush communities had no business district, no shops, and few signs (everyone already knew where everything was). Other than NAPA and the building supply store, everything came from Stuaqpaq (big store, in English), where you could buy groceries, clothing, ivory carvings, all-terrain vehicles, deli sandwiches, books, music, and so on. The houses, arrayed along wide gravel roads, were mostly plywood cubes sitting on pilings—the warmth inside isolated from the permafrost to prevent the ground from melting and turning to mush. Meat or fowl would hang to dry outside, snowmachine parts and animal bones lay here and there, and dogs orbited on tethers. To visit, you had to enter, unbidden, the first room of the house, the quanitchaq, or Arctic entry, a sort of airlock to keep the cold weather at bay. For anyone to hear you inside, you had to knock on the inner door, inside the quanitchaq. But in most Eskimo homes, the quanitchaq was piled high with boots, coats, toys, tools, snowmachine oil, garbage, frozen meat, skins, and other miscellany—it seemed like a personal space—and shutting the outer door before knocking on the inner door plunged you into total darkness. Even the addresses were indecipherable to an outsider because, instead of using street names, each building was designated solely by a unique number. To find your way around, you simply had to know the numbers: when a person said 4337, for example, that meant the mayor’s